Who is Tim Berners-Lee? Who is Tim Berners-Lee? Updated October 20, 2016 Who is Tim Berners-Lee? Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955) is best known for being the person attributed with the creation of the World Wide Web. He originally came up with the idea of sharing and organizing information from any computer system in any geographical location by using a system of hyperlinks (simple textual connections that "linked" one piece of content to the next) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a way that computers could receive and retrieve Web pages. Berners-Lee also created HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the standard programming language behind every Web page, as well as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) system that gave every Web page its unique designation. How did Tim Berners-Lee come up with the idea of the World Wide Web? While at CERN , Tim Berners-Lee grew increasingly frustrated with how information was being shared and organized. Every computer at CERN stored different information which required unique log-ins, and not every computer could be easily accessed.

This situation sparked Berners-Lee to come up with a simple proposal for information management , which was the World Wide Web. Did Tim Berners-Lee invent the Internet? No, Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the Internet . The Internet was created in the late 1960's as a collaborative effort between several universities and the U.S. Department of Defense (ARPANET). Tim Berners-Lee used the already existing Internet as the foundation for how the World Wide Web would function. For more on the early days of the Internet, read The History of the Internet . What is the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web? The Internet is a vast network, comprised of many different computer networks and cables and wireless devices, all interconnected. The Web, on the other hand, is information (content, text, images, movies, sound, etc.) that can be found using connections (hyperlinks) that connect to other hyperlinks on the Web. We use the Internet to connect to other computers and networks; we use the Web to locate information. The World Wide Web could not exist without the Internet as its foundation. How did the phrase "World Wide Web" come into being?

According to the official Tim Berners-Lee FAQ , the phrase "World Wide Web" was chosen for its alliterative quality and because it best described the Web's global, decentralized format (i.e., a web). Since those early days the phrase has shortened in common usage to just being referred to as the Web. What was the first Web page ever created? A copy of the first Web page ever created by Tim Berners-Lee can be found at The World Wide Web Project . It's a fun way to really see how far the Web has come in just a few short years. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee used his office NeXT computer to act as the world's first web server. What is Tim Berners-Lee up to now? Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the Founder and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium , an organization aimed at developing sustainable Web standards. He also works as the director of the World Wide Web Foundation , a co-director of the Web Science Trust , and is a professor at the University of Southampton's Computer Science Department . A more detailed look at all of Tim Berners-Lee's involvements and awards can be found at his official biography page .

A Web Pioneer: Tim Berners-Lee Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004 for his pioneering work) originated the idea of sharing information freely via hyperlinks, created HTML (HyperText Markup Language), and came up with the idea of each Web page having a unique address, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Continue Reading Tim Berners-Lee Tim Berners-Lee Nationality: England Executive summary: Inventor of the World Wide Web Born in London on 8 June 1955, Berners-Lee's education included Emanuel School in Wandsworth, and later Queen's College, Oxford. At Oxford he majored in physics and built his own computer out of spare parts. Berners-Lee was also caught hacking during his stay at Oxford and banned from using the university's computer. After graduating from Oxford in 1976, Berners-Lee worked on various programming projects before taking a position as a consultant/software engineer for CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1980.

It was during his stint at CERN that Berners-Lee developed the first prototype of the World Wide Web. Called Enquire, the program was designed to help Berners-Lee keep track of the vast web of researchers and projects connected with CERN. The program was never released for public use. Berners-Lee moved on to other projects, in 1984 he returned to CERN. He set to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. He soon found himself again faced with CERN's vast and shifting networks of projects and researchers, plus CERN's own rather cranky internal system for sharing and distributing scientific information. Berners-Lee began to envision a global information space where computers around the world would be linked together, allowing researchers to surf from one body of data to another, gathering information related to their own work, while effortlessly sharing their insights and suggestions with other researchers. This system would allow researchers from far-flung nations and institutions to review and discuss not merely finished research, but also work in progress. Information could be available in days or weeks, rather than in the months or years entailed in standard print publication.

Unlike CERN's current system, Berners-Lee's would be decentralized, allowing participation from various computer platforms, in various languages, without all the bureaucratic restrictions and delays. Ironically, when Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN, in 1989, he received no reply. As he waited for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn he began working out the details of his system. Drawing on the 1945 work of Vannevar Bush , as well as later work by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart , he wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or language that computers would use to communicate hypertext documents via the Internet. He also worked out a scheme for locating the documents: each document would be assigned a Universal Resource Identifier, or URI, essentially its own unique address (now called a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator). By the end of 1990 Berners-Lee had written the first browser, or client program, for retrieving and viewing documents. It was this browser that he christened the WorldWideWeb. But the work was not quite done yet; Berners-Lee also had to write the first web server, the software that handles the storing and transmitting of web pages.

He also had to create HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language, that describes the format and layout of material on the page. With all this in place, and still no word of official interest in his project, Berners-Lee proceeded to set up the first web server, info.cern.ch. In 1991 he made his World Wide Web browser and web server software available on the Internet, advertising it through posts in various newsgroups, including alt.hypertext. Interest soared as users around the world began setting up their own web servers. As these new webmasters emailed him, Berners-Lee linked to their site from his own. He also utilized their feedback, and the resultant ideas from discussion groups around the world, to further evolve his design. Once the number of users on the Web hit a certain point, its functionality, and hence its mass appeal, began to skyrocket. Scientists and other researchers discovered that it was easier to post information once, on their website, rather than to continually answer email questions and repost to Internet groups (whose traffic eventually buried most information). Government agencies also began embracing the web. But as the web grew it became necessary to develop a browser that could function on a broader variety of computers types and operating systems.

With the popularity of Windows and the point and click interface, and whole new flood of potential users arrived, forcing further redesign. Other people began creating browsers to fill the gap. Most notable of these was Marc Andreessen , a then-student at the University of Illinois who developed first Mosaic and later the more familiar Netscape Navigator , followed later by the even more successful Microsoft Internet Explorer . Unlike Microsoft founder Bill Gates , Berners-Lee's contribution to the World Wide Web did not lead to riches (although he did earn a couple of handsome cash prizes along the way). Instead he remained committed to making the web universally accessible, without patents or royalties due. To help ensure that the Web remained a free and open entity, independent of any particular government or corporation, he formed the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. The Consortium helps to mediate the aims and conflicts of companies involved in the development of the Web and it also helps establish and promote standards and protocols that work for both web designers and for web browsers. Berners-Lee became the first holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT, where he is a senior research scientist.

A Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, he is both a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Royal Society. Hailed by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest minds of this century, Berners-Lee -- or rather the Web itself -- has radically transformed the way technologically literate nations do business, entertain themselves, exchange news and ideas, and educate their children. Tim Berners-Lee Tim Berners-Lee Biography Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He founded and Directs the World Wide Consortium (W3C) the forum for technical development of the Web. He founded the Web Foundation whose mission is that the WWW serves Humanity, and co-founded the Open Data Institute in London. His research group at MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab ("CSAIL") plans to re-decentralize the Web. Tim spends a lot of time fighting for rights such as privacy, freedom and openness of the Web. A graduate of Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web while at CERN , the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989.

He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread. He is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence ( CSAIL ) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) . He is also a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK. Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity. In 2011 he was named to the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation , a globally oriented private foundation with the mission of advancing human welfare. He has promoted open government data globally and is a member of the UK's Transparency Board.

He is President of London's Open Data Institute . In 2001 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. In 2009 he was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of " Weaving the Web ". On March 18 2013, Tim, along with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity." Before you mail me If you need someone to find something for you about some arbitrary subject (travel agents, or parakeets or whatever), don't ask me, but try the Virtual Library for example, or your favorite search engine. If you want to know how to run a server, or how to edit HTML, check the W3C web or your local bookstore.

I'm sorry I can't answer individual requests for help. If you can't access something on , you find bad links from pages, or errors in the hypertext please see the webmaster's documentation .. If you are doing homework or a school project on the history of the Web then please check my Kid's questions , or the more general Frequently Asked Questions ; and also, W3C FAQ , or my press FAQ as almost everything I have is there or linked from this page. I am sorry I cannot help with individual projects. If you are a member of the press and need clarification or an interview, please mail w3t-pr@w3.org (and Cc me) with details. If it is about a possible speaking engagement, see below . If you have a serious comment on things I have signed, then do email me. I am also always open to discussion with W3C Advisory Committee representatives. What not to email Email is safe unless it contains programs. (Data and documents are fine, programs are not). If you send me a program, I will not run it, as it could damage my system and could be a virus.

Note: Documents for Microsoft word, Excel, and possibly other Office programs tend to execute programs (scripts) in what you would expect to be harmless documents. These can expose my machine to viruses, because these programs do not (it seems) prevent scripts from running within a document when it received by email. Please do not send me Microsoft Office documents. If you are sending text, please send it as plain text, HTML, of necessary PDF. If you use your favorite word process, slide tool, etc, and send it in that program's format, then you are forcing me install proprietary software on whatever machine I read them on. What you can email These are all good document standards: Plain text messages, HTML (sometimes called rich text) pages without scripts, Photos (JPEG files, PNG, GIF and SVG), PDF, SMIL, RDF/XML, N3 and so on. All these can be sent as messages or as attachments to messages. I can read them with a variety of software programs, and they cannot contain viruses, unless there is a serious bug in the code I use to read them. If you don't need anything else, then use plain text. These are good rules when emailing anyone.

Please use my full name in the "To" line with my email address, as this will make your message look less like spam. This will happen automatically if you have me in your address book. If you just type in my email address, I probably won't see your mail. What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented The Web? | Techdirt What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented The Web? from the it-would-be-quite-different dept You may have seen the stories a week or so ago about how it was the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee putting up the first web page . While many, many people still confuse "the web" with "the internet," Berners-Lee's creation really did help take what was mostly a system used by a few nerds (myself include) and add the elements that made it possible to go mainstream in a big, big, big way. And while many folks are talking about just how amazingly far we've come in just 20 years, Marco Arment (the InstaPaper guy) reminds us that if Berners-Lee had sought and received a patent for the web, it would just now be coming out of patent coverage .

That sets up an interesting thought experiment. Where do you think the world would be today if the World Wide Web had been patented? Here are a few guesses: Rather than an open World Wide Web, most people would have remained on proprietary, walled gardens, like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and Delphi. While those might have eventually run afoul of the patents, since they were large companies or backed by large companies, those would have been the few willing to pay the licensing fee. The innovation level in terms of the web would have been drastically limited. Concepts like AJAX, real time info, etc. would not be present or would be in their infancy. The only companies "innovating" on these issues would be those few large players, and they wouldn't even think of the value of such things. No Google. Search would be dismal, and limited to only the proprietary system you were on. Most people's use of online services would be more about "consumption" than "communication." There would still be chat rooms and such, but there wouldn't be massive public communication developments like blogs and Twitter. There might be some social networking elements, but they would be very rudimentary within the walled garden. No iPhone.

While some might see this as separate from the web, I disagree. I don't think we'd see quite the same interest or rise in smartphones without the web. Would we see limited proprietary "AOL phones?" Possibly, but with a fragmented market and not as much value, I doubt there's the necessary ecosystem to go as far as the iPhone. Open internet limited by lawsuit. There would still be an open internet, and things like gopher and Usenet would have grown and been able to do a little innovation. However, if gopher tried to expand to be more web like, we would have seen a legal fight that not only delayed innovation, but limited the arenas in which we innovated. What else do people think might have happened? I'd also argue that Berners-Lee himself would hardly be a name that most people knew about. When you think about just how limiting a world this would have been compared to what we have today... and then begin to wonder about what "web-like" invention of today is now locked up under patents, it really makes you wonder just how much we've held back innovation in this arena.

BBC - History - Tim Berners Lee z Tim Berners Lee, at the Rayburn building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, 13 June 2001. © Berners Lee is a British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. Timothy John Berners Lee was born on 8 June 1955 and grew up in London. He studied physics at Oxford University and became a software engineer. In 1980, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, he first described the concept of a global system, based on the concept of 'hypertext', that would allow researchers anywhere to share information. He also built a prototype called 'Enquire'. In 1984, Berners Lee's returned to CERN, which was also home to a major European Internet node. In 1989, Berners Lee published a paper called 'Information Management: A Proposal' in which he married up hypertext with the Internet, to create a system for sharing and distributing information not just within a company, but globally. He named it the World Wide Web. He also created the first web browser and editor.

The world's first website, was launched on 6 August 1991. It explained the World Wide Web concept and gave users an introduction to getting started with their own websites. In 1994, Berners Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. He has served as director of the consortium since then. He also works as a senior research scientist at LCS which has now become the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Tim Berners-Lee I nternet Pioneers Tim Berners-Lee The World Wide Web (WWW) is so ubiquitous that it seems strange to think that it has only been around for a few years. Indeed, use of the WWW became widespread in the mid 1990's, but its beginnings can actually be traced back to 1980 when Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman who had recently graduated from Oxford, landed a temporary contract job as a software consultant at CERN ( the famous European Particle physics Laboratory in Geneva).

He wrote a program, called Enquire, which he called a "memory substitute," for his personal use to help him remember connections between various people and projects at the lab ( Wright, 64 ). This was a very helpful tool since CERN was (and still is) a large international organization involving a multitude of researchers located around the world. Berners-Lee finished his work at CERN and left, but he returned in 1984 with a more permanent position. His previous work with Enquire had left a mental mark. He envisioned a global information space where information stored on computers everywhere was linked and available to anyone anywhere. There were two technologies already developed that would allow his vision to become reality. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article entitled, " As We May Thin k," in which he described a theoretical system for storing information based on associations. Others like Ted Nelson and Douglas Englebar t had furthered Bush's work with their own work on hypertext. Hypertext allows documents to be published in a nonlinear format. Hypertext links allow the reader to jump instantly from one electronic document to another. Berners-Lee had already used this format when he wrote Enquire.

The other technology was the Interneta computer network of networks. The Internet is a very general infrastructure that allows computers to link together . It uses standardized protocols (TCP/IP) which let computers of different types using different software communicate. Hypertext would allow any document in the information space to be linked to any other document. The Internet would allow those documents to be transmitted. At CERN if researchers wanted to share documents they had to organize and format them so that they would be compatible with the main CERN computing system. This was a problem since the researchers contributing to the work going on at CERN were located around the world and used many different kinds of computers and software. Many researchers were upset and sometimes unwilling to expend the extra effort to make their work conform to the CERN system. Berners-Lee thought, " it would be so much easier if everybody asking me questions all the time could just read my database, and it would be so much nicer if I could find out what these guys are doing by jumping into a similar database of information for them" ( Wright, 66 ). He decided that a simple system with simple rules that would be acceptable to all was needed.

The new system would need to be easy and decentralized so that anyone anywhere could share informationwithout having to go to a centralized authority. In 1989, Berners-Lee submitted a proposal at CERN to develop an information system that would create a web of information. Initially, his proposal received no reply, but he began working on his idea anyway. In 1990, he wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)the language computers would use to communicate hypertext documents over the Internet and designed a scheme to give documents addresses on the Internet. Berners-Lee called this address a Universal Resource Identifier (URI). (This is now usually known as a URLUniform Resource Loc ator.) By the end of the year he had also written a client program (browser) to retrieve and view hypertext documents. He called this client "WorldWideWeb." Hypertext pages were formatted using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that Berners-Lee had written. He also wrote the first web server. A web server is the software that stores web pages on a computer and makes them available to be accessed by others. Berners-Lee set up the first web server known as "info.cern.ch." at CERN.

Berners-Lee tried to sell his new creation at CERN as a way to link data between the many incompatible systems at CERN. Still the bureaucracy at CERN was slow in acknowledging his efforts. Berners-Lee then turned to the Internet community. In 1991, he made his WorldWideWeb browser and web server software available on the Internet and posted notices to several newsgroups including alt.hypertext. The Web began to take off as computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own web servers. Often the owners of the new sites would email Berners-Lee and he would link to their sites from the CERN site. His dream of a global information space was finally happening. As the number of users on the Web grew it became more attractive as a medium. Scientists, who were already used to sharing information on the Internet began to embrace the Web. It was easier to post information on the Web once than reply repeatedly to multiple requests for the same data. They also no longer had to worry whether or not the other scientists used a different operating system. Government agencies who had responsibilities to make their information public also began turning toward the Web. As more people began using the Web the need for more point-and-click browsers became evident.

Berners-Lee had developed his WorldWideWeb browser on a very specialized personal computer called a NeXT. What was needed now was browser that Mac, PC, and Unix users could use. This need was soon met as others, mostly students, began creating new browsers. For instance, Students at the Helsinki University of Technology wrote Erwisea browser for Unix machines, and Pei Wei, a U.C. Berkeley student wrote Viola. Colleagues of Berners-Lee at CERN wrote a browser for Mac machines called Samba. Marc Andreesen , a student at the University of Illinois, with the help of fellow students, created the Mosaic browser. Growth of the Web and Potential Problems New browsers and the increasing amount of information that could be found on t he Web made it an ever more attractive medium. It grew exponentially, both in the number of sites and users. The number of visitors to the info.cern.ch server was growing by a factor of ten every year. By the summer of 1993, the site was getting ten thousand hits a day ( Berners-Lee, 75) .

Berners-Lee was predictably happy about the growth of his brainchild, but various groups seemed to be going in opposite directions. He feared that the Web would splinter into various factionsacademic, commercial, free, etc. Berners-Lee was concerned over some of the new directions the Web was taking. There were decided differences between his original vision and the visions of Andreesen and the Netscape crowd. The Web was designed to be a serious medium. Berners-Lee feared that this new visuallyappealing Web was becoming frivolous. Berners-Lee and other HTML purists were alarmed by all the new tags created by Netscape. Andreesen remembers, " Tim bawled me out in the summer of '93 for adding images to the thing," ( Reid, 12 ). World Wide Web Consortium Bern ers-Lee was also concerned that the new success of the Web would lead to destructive competition that would create proprietary Web products that could destroy the open nature of the Web. He knew that some sort of oversight was needed to keep the Web running smoothly, but any new oversight organization could also not be allowed to fundamentally alter the free and open character of the Web.

He envisioned a forum where developers of servers and browsers could reach a consensus on how the Web should operate. On May 24, 1994, the first WWW conference was held at CERN. Berners-Lee used this conference to share his vision to create a consortium to help the Web develop smoothly: "The conference was the way to tell everyone that no one should control it, and that a consortium could help parties agree an how to work together while also actually withstanding any effort by any institution or company to 'control' things." ( Berners-Lee, 80 ). Berners-Lee also discussed the idea of a consortium with some his friends at MIT. In July of 1994 he received a phone call from one of those friends. MIT agreed to host the consortium. MIT would be the American headquarters and CERN would be the European headquarters. (CERN would later decide to drop out of the consortium and France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control became the European headquarters). Berners-Lee moved almost immediately to MIT to head the new consortium, which was known as the World Wide Web consortium or simply W3C.

The purpose of the new consortium was to " 'lead the Web to its full potential,' primarily by developing common protocols to enhance the interoperability and evolution of the Web." ( Berners-Lee, 94 ). Membership in the consortium would be open to any organization: commercial, governmental, educational, etc. Any member would be free to participate in any meeting or working group put together by the consortium. The W3C develops open technical specifications that can be used for free by anyone. These specifications are reached by a very democratic process. Any member can suggest a new project. If there is sufficient support within the consortium the project proceeds. When it is finished it is released by the consortium as a "recommendation." The W3C does not enforce its recommendations. It simply encourages everyone to adopt them. Sir Tim Berners-Lee – World Wide Web Foundation " Sir Tim Berners-Lee " by Paul Clarke - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

Web Inventor and Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation The inventor of the world wide web and one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a scientist and academic whose visionary and innovative work has transformed almost every aspect of our lives. Having invented the Web in 1989 while working at CERN and subsequently working to ensure it was made freely available to all, Berners-Lee is now dedicated to enhancing and protecting the web’s future. He is a Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, which seeks to ensure the web serves humanity by establishing it as a global public good and a basic right. He is also Director of the World Wide Web Consortium , a global web standards organization he founded in 1994 to lead the web to its full potential. In 2012 he co-founded the Open Data Institute (ODI) which advocates for Open Data in the UK and globally. Sir Tim has advised a number of governments and corporations on ongoing digital strategies.

A graduate of Oxford University, Sir Tim presently holds academic posts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab), (USA) and the University of Southampton (UK.) Sir Tim has received multiple accolades in recent years. These include receiving the first Queen’ Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2013, election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and being knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth in 2004. He has received over 10 honorary doctorates, is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and was awarded the Finland Millennium Prize in 2004. In 2007, Berners-Lee was awarded the UK’s Order of Merit – a personal gift of the monarch limited to just 24 living recipients. In 2012, he played a starring role in the opening ceremony for the Olympics, where, in front of an audience of some 900 million, he tweeted : “This is for everyone”.

Tim Berners-Lee | Internet Hall of Fame Internet Hall of Fame Celebrating people who bring the Internet to life Search form INTERNET HALL of FAME INNOVATOR Tim Berners-Lee In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as web technology spread. He is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 that develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a founding Director of the Web Science Trust (WST) launched in 2009 to promote research and education in Web Science, the multidisciplinary study of humanity connected by technology. Berners-Lee is also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.

At MIT, Berners-Lee is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL). He is also a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK. In 2001 Berners-Lee became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth, and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. Answers for young people - Tim Berners-Lee Note: Some of these questions are now answered in much more depth in my book, Weaving the Web. Adults, see also: the main FAQ . Answers for Young People Doing a report? Want to figure out how the web works? I have put here some answers to questions that children of various ages (6-96) have asked. If you need the answers for a school project or just because you're interested, then feel free to quote them from here. In your report, please say where you got them from.

This is just one page for kids of all ages so some you might feel the answers are too simple and some too complicated. I hope you find it useful, anyway. Where were you when you invented the WWW? I was working in a physics laboratory called CERN . (CERN is in Geneva, Switzerland. Switzerland is near the middle of Europe.) At CERN, people study High Energy Physics. That is the physics of really really small particles - particles much smaller than atoms. It turns out that if you want to investigate really really small things, you need huge machines called accelerators to smash particles together really hard. Then you have huge gadgets (about the size of a house) which detects what happens, and what bits fly off, so you can figure out whether you managed to make any new types of particle. CERN is a big place - a few thousand people work there. Many of them are scientists whose jobs are at universities in different places in the world, and they come to CERN because they need to use the huge accelerators at CERN. What made you think of the WWW? Well, I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it.

Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee. Because people at CERN came from universities all over the world, they brought with them all types of computers. Not just Unix, Mac and PC: there were all kinds of big mainframe computer and medium sized computers running all sorts of software. I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be inserted into another system. More than once. And when you are a programmer, and you solve one problem and then you solve one that's very similar, you often think, "Isn't there a better way? Can't we just fix this problem for good?" That became "Can't we convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read?" And that became the WWW. Actually, it was a grown up who asked this very reasonable question. When you understand this, then you will understand the difference between the Internet and the Web. And you will realize that it is all quite simple!

:-) (You can skip the bits in small type) When you are reading a web page, the computer isn't showing you everything about the link. Behind the underlined or colored bit of text which you click on is an invisible thing like Its called a URL. This is the name of the web page to which the link goes. (The web page you are reading has this one: Behind each link, hidden from you, is the URL of the other web page, the one you'd get to if you followed the link. When you click on a link, your computer takes this URL. It wants to get a copy of the web page. There are a few different ways of doing this. The one I'm going to tell you about is just used for URLs which starthttp: . (This whole recipe I'm going to tell you, which your computer uses for getting web pages, is called the HyperText Transfer Protocol . That's what HTTP stands for. There are other protocols. But this is the most common one. ) If the URL starts with http:, then the computer takes the next bit of the URL, between the // and the /. It might be for example. This is the name of the web server.

However, It can't communicate with the web server until it knows its computer number, because the Internet actually works with numbers. (A computer number is actually called its Internet Protocol Address, or IP Address. It is normally written as four numbers with dots, like 192.168.0.1 ) So there will two stages to this - first, finding out the number of the web server, and then asking the web for a copy of the web page. Your computer makes up a packet of information. An Internet packet is a message, a bit like a short email or a long text message. The packet starts off with the number of the computer the packet is going to, and then the number of the the computer which sent it, and then it has what the packet is about, and then whatever it is one computer is sending to the other. Now all over the Internet there are special computers whose job is to keep a list of computer names and numbers. When your computer is set up, it is set up to know the internet number of one of these.

Your computer sends off the packet to it, saying it wants to know the number of (A computer which can look up computer names -- domain names as they are called -- is called the Domain Name Service (DNS) server in the network preferences if you really want to know. When a DNS server looks up a computer name, it either knows it because it has it in a list, or it just asks another DNS server which knows more names.) How does the packet get there? Simple. Your computer sends it down the ethernet connection or phone line from your computer, or it transmits it by radio to a base station which sends it down some wire. Whatever that wire goes through, eventually it connects to some other computer (maybe one in the cable company, or phone company). The Internet is a net -- really shaped like real net like a fishing net -- of computers all connected together by various cables. Each computer, when it gets a packet, looks at it and sees what computer number it is being sent to. It then just passes it on to the next computer in the net, in the general direction toward its destination. Pretty simple? yes, well, it is simple. The packet gets passed on until it gets to its destination.

Typically, a packet might be passed on by more than 10 computers before it arrives. (This way of getting a packet to its destination is called the Internet Protocol (IP)) In this case, the destination was the name server. The name server looks up the number of the computer from its name. Of course the name server knows the number of your computer, because that was in the packet too. So it sends a reply packet to tell you computer the number it needed. Ok. Your computer now knows the number of the web server, So it goes back to the URL -- remember the thing which started with http:? Lets say the URL behind the link was . It has used the bit to find the number of the web server which has a copy of the page. Now it send off a request to that server asking it for the web page. It sends the whole URL, and the server sends back a copy. The only problem is that the web page won't fit in a packet. Packets can only be around 512 bytes - about long enough for a text message of 500 characters. Even the request that your computer sends off can be longer than will fit in a packet.

So what happens is the computer just breaks the message into parts, and sends each part in a packet. I told you this isn't rocket science. It just like a television series coming in installments. It also puts in each packet a packet number so that the other computer can make sure its got all the parts and got them in right order. (This method of splitting message sup into packets and putting them back together again has a name, which you don't have to remember. It is Transmission Control Protocol , or TCP. So that's what people mean when they talk about TCP/IP.) So your computer gets back a bunch of packets with bits of the web page in them. It puts them in order and displays them on your screen. There are special codes (called HTML tags) which tell it when to do things like headings and bold and italics and ... oh, of course... links. Yes, every time it finds the HTML tag for a link, it displays the text specially (like blue and underlined) and makes a note of the URL of the linked page. Because at any time, you could click on the link, and it'll be doing this stuff all over again.

@@@ This really needs lots of nice diagrams @@@ No, no, no! When I was doing the WWW, most of the bits I needed were already done. Vint Cerf and people he worked with had figured out the Internet Protocol, and also the Transmission Control Protocol. Paul Mockapetris and friends had figured out the Domain Name System. People had already used TCP/IP and DNS to make email, and other cool things. So I could email other people who maybe would like to help work on making the WWW. I didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from one document to another had been thought about lots of people, including Vanevar Bush in 1945, and by Ted Nelson (who actually invented the word hypertext). Bush did it before computers really existed. Ted thought of a system but didn't use the internet. Doug Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like WWW except that it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been invented yet. Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer, and didn't link all the way across the world.

I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web. Just like that? No, actually the inventing it was easy. The amazing thing which makes it work is that so many people actually have made web servers, and that they all work the same way, on the Internet. They all use HTTP. So the difficult bit was persuading people to join in. And getting them to agree to all use the same sort of HTTP, and URLs, and HTML. I'm still doing that sort of thing. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is like a club of people and companies who feel the Web is important, and keeping it working is important, and making it even better and even more powerful is important. I am the director of W3C (I started it) but thousands of people are now working on all kinds of wonderful things. Well, because it is basically. No, honestly... I want you to know that you too can make new programs which create new fun ways of using computers and using the Internet. I want you to realize that, if you can imagine a computer doing something, you can program a computer to do that. Unbounded opportunity...

limited only by your imagination. And a couple of laws of physics. Of course, what happens with computers is that you have a basic simple idea and then you have to add things on to it for practical reasons. So real-world computer programs can end up with a lot of stuff in them. If they are good, they are still simple inside. What did you do when you were a child? I grew up in south-west London. I wasn't very good at sports. When I was 11 I went to a school which was between two railway tracks, so I saw lots of trains and started train-spotting. I also had a model railway in my bedroom. It was a long thin layout with a 4-track station in the middle, and on each side pairs of tracks going off into tunnels to actually loop back to each other. I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. The I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made computer out of an old television set. I bought the television from a repair shop down the road for ï¿½5 (about $7). My mother and father were both working with the very early computers when they met.

Later on, my mother taught maths in school. They taught me that maths is a lot of fun. (In England, mathematics is "maths", in the USA, "math"). When I went to Oxford University, I studied physics. I thought that science might be more practical than maths, halfway between math and electronics. In fact it turned out to be very special subject all of itself, and fascinating for all that. Can you tell me more about your personal life? No, I don't want to - sorry. I like to keep work and personal life separate. What is on the web on this page and my home page is all there is. Please do not email me asking for more information for school projects, etc. Look -- if you had written a program like WorldWideWeb -- which you well might --- would you want everyone to know what you had for breakfast? No, you see? Ok. Thank you for your understanding. But I am doing a project where we have to get "primary" sources, which means I have to interview the subject. And I'm doing it on you. So I have to interview you. I'm sorry, I don't have time to talk to everyone individually. Please use these web pages.

I'm interested in Math -- what exciting stuff is there we don't do at school? Some kids find solving math problems is fun, and like the power of having new techniques, and imaging new math concepts. If you are one of those, and you are wondering what bits of math might be fun to follow up on your own or with friends or friendly adults, here is an attempt to explain some paths which connect together. Some of it is easy, some hard, but honestly which is which for you depends on what your mind happens to grasp, and how well it is explained! These are some of the bits I found interesting. This is NOT an explanation - you will need books and people for that . It is just a sort of list of places you might want to go. Vectors are fun. Vectors are quantities with direction, like not just how fast something goes but which direction it is going in. They can be written as three numbers instead of one. (The examples in this FAQ will only work is your browser supports MathML, which is rare. If your browser supports MathML, the following will be vertical, not horizonal.) ( or just x' = M x where the bold letters stand for vectors and matrices. Suddenly all kinds of things fall into place.

To make a combined transformation, you just multiply two matrices together. You naturally start wondering about how to undo a transformation, which is finding the inverse transformation, which is finding the inverse of a matrix. And then you realize that this is just the same problem as solving the linear equations you had earlier. So any time you can see how to solve the equations, you can find the inverse matrix. Also, there is a way of working out the inverse of a 3x3 matrix, so you can always solve 3x3 equations (when a solution exists). It is this way everything fits together which makes math fun and powerful. Another branch you might be interested in is calculus. This is about things changing and moving, to its very connected to physics, skiing, driving cars, flying planes, and so on. So it can also be fun to visualize. When you study calculus, you start off by thinking about how (say) the speed of a ball changes in a particular millisecond, and how its position changes. There is a lot of calculus where you know, say, how something's speed changes with time, and you want to figure out where it gets to. How fast a function changes is another function.

Finding it is called differentiating the first function. The inverse is called integrating. Some people find learning and puzzling out how to differentiate and integrate all kinds of functions interesting. But if you have done vectors and matrices then you can connect that to the ideas of calculus, and you have new powerful mental tools. You can now write equations about the force on something and its acceleration as vectors. f = m a says the force (a vector) on something is equal to the acceleration (how much its velocity is changing, another vector) times the mass of the thing. You can figure out how things like spaceships move in 3d space with time. From there, you can think about values (like density, or pressure, or temperature) which have a single (non vector) value, but a different value in each place. You can think about how those values change with place. How does the pressure in a swimming pool change with depth? Why? Things which have values all over the place are called fields. Think of the pool being filled with little numbers showing the pressure at that place.

Then you can just put what you know about vectors together with what you know about fields, and think of values which are different in different places and times, and also have direction. They are vectors. Imagine a swimming pool full of little arrows, each arrow showing (by size and direction) how fast and which way the water is moving there. Imagine what happens when someone dives in. These are called vector fields. It turns out that when you do calculus with vector fields, you have really neat little results about how stuff swirls around, about how it squashes (or doesn't), and so on. When you connect how things change with position with how they change with time, then you can show waves happen. And just as it seems that the equations are getting complicated again, then suddenly get simple. It turns out that the differentiation in space can be written as a single "vector operator", called dell and written ∇ This makes all the equations writable in much less space (without even any x's and y's and z's).

One of the significant equations which you get from look the physics of all this is the wave equation, which tell you about sound waves in a swimming pool and even Maxwell's Equation s which show that light waves follow from the properties of electricity and magnetism. Another branch of this which connects to matrices is the eigenvector concept. For any transformation, it turns out there are some vectors which end up being stretched or shrunk but not changed in direction. These are called eigenvectors. It turns out that for lots of interesting problems, the eigenvectors are at right angles to each other, just like the x y and z axes. In fact, if you turn the problem around in your mind, and use the eigenvectors as the axes, then suddenly the problem becomes really simple. The complicated equations untangle and turn into a set of unconnected simple equations. Eigenvectors are finding out how complicated things (like a car suspension) behave. It also turns out that quantum mechanics says that the same equations are used to find out how atoms behave.

Also, it turns out that when search engines like Google look at a mass of web links around a topic, the eigenvectors of the link matrix correspond to things the web pages are about, and finding them allows one to find the most relevant page for that topic. So eigenvectors are a really useful concept. I guess I've used physics as the hook for most of this math, and that is one reason why it is interesting personally for me. If that doesn't interest you so much, then maybe the math of prime numbers will. Check out modulo arithmentic, Euler's theorem, and work your way to the RSA algorithm for public key cryptography. There are lots of other areas of math of course. And lots of books on each. And web sites, I'm sure. But there are some of my suggestions if you are looking for a map of things to look for. The main thing is, to have fun. So do you think the Web is basically been a good idea or a bad one? Some people point out that the Web can be used for all the wrong things. For downloading pictures of horrible, gruesome, violent or obscene things, or ways of making bombs which terrorists could use.

Other people say how their lives have been saved because they found out about the disease they had on the Web, and figured out how to cure it. I think the main thing to remember is that any really powerful thing can be used for good or evil. Dynamite can be used to build tunnels or to make missiles. Engines can be put in ambulances or tanks. Nuclear power can be used for bombs or for electrical power. So what is made of the Web is up to us. You, me, and everyone else. Here is my hope. The Web is a tool for communicating. With the Web, you can find out what other people mean. You can find out where they are coming from. The Web can help people understand each other. Think about most of the bad things that have happened between people in your life. Maybe most of them come down to one person not understanding another. Even wars. Let's use the web to create neat new exciting things. Let's use the Web to help people understand each other.

History of the Internet and Inventor Tim Berners-Lee ARPAnet: The First Internet Father of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee Tim Berners-Lee was the man leading the development of the World Wide Web (with help of course), the defining of HTML (hypertext markup language) used to create web pages, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators). continue reading below our video What to Do If Your Identity is Stolen All of those developments took place between 1989 and 1991. Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, England and graduated in Physics from Oxford University in 1976. He is currently the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium , the group that sets technical standards for the Web. Besides Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf is also named as an internet daddy. Ten years out of high school, Vinton Cerf begun co-designing and co-developing the protocols and structure of what became the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee Biography HTML Vannevar Bush first proposed the basics of hypertext in 1945.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, HTML (hypertext markup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators) in 1990. Tim Berners-Lee was the primary author of html, assisted by his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Question: What did Tim Berners Lee found?
Answer: WORLD WIDE WEB